Life of Joe Goldstein, 81, was New York sports' long-running story

Nobody remembers exactly when they met Joey Goldstein, a character out of an older New York City and a better one, out of all the old ideas about press agents and newspapers, out of a sports world so much more fun than we get out of it now. If you were in the business of sports in New York over the past 50 years, attached to it in any way, you knew Joey. You just couldn't remember exactly when he came blowing into your life or your office, talking and laughing and wanting to sell you something.

"When did I meet him?" Jimmy Breslin was saying late Friday afternoon. "Maybe college doubleheaders at the Garden. What year was that?"

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He was Breslin's friend and the late Dick Schaap's friend and he was mine. He was a friend to Roosevelt Raceway in the old days and the whole harness-racing business and later, much later, a friend to ESPN. And Joey Goldstein was so much more than that, from the time he hit the city running as a kid, when he first put a phone to his ear and never took it out:

He was a fast-talking history of sports in this city.

If it ever happened here, Joey knew about it. If somebody did something here, Joey knew them. And he remembered. He remembered the big things, if not all the details. Every story reminded him of another story, whether he was taking over the whole upstairs at Patsy's for his 75th birthday party or having Ralph Branca sing "God Bless America" at his 80th a few years later. You would say he came out of Runyon's New York, except that as much as Joey knew about the past of his adopted city - somehow he was born in South Carolina - he always refused to live there.

He never stopped running, never stopped looking for the right angle, even when there was nothing in it for him. The last time I saw him was last September, at Jeremy Schaap's wedding. And we were talking about a big story he helped me with about 10 years ago, one about Dolph Bigos, who had been part of the point-shaving scandal at Long Island University in the early 1950s.

Bigos was a young guy on a great LIU team who made a mistake and took money, and fell out of basketball and out of sight after that. His name came up in March of 1997 because LIU was back in the NCAA Tournament. For me it all started with a phone call from Joey, ordering me to find somebody from the team that had shaved the points.

"Dolph Bigos is your guy," he said.

He told me that day that there was so much more about Bigos - and Sherman White, and the rest of the guys from Clair Bee's team - than people knew. Of course it was Joey who told me that Bigos had fought for his country at the Battle of the Bulge.

With his help, I tracked down Mr. Bigos in Jersey, and found out that he had become a teacher of physical education and coached freshman basketball in his Jersey town and even gone back to LIU in the 1960s to get his degree. He ended up on the front page of this paper that day, saying, "I'm proud of what I made of my life." So that was one more big idea from Joey Goldstein because his life was full of them.

The business of public relations changed during his life in New York, got bigger and slicker and richer, and the real art wasn't art at all, it was just damage control and crisis management. Not with Joey. For him the game never changed: If he could get one of his clients in the paper, he won.

"They might not all be great stories," he said one time, pitching something or other. "But I'll never give you a bad one."

He loved old college basketball. He loved track and field. He loved Fred LeBow and the New York City Marathon. Joey got with Fred and the race in the 1970s and all of a sudden people were talking about it. And when Joey got you talking about one of his events or one of his athletes, it was as if there was a sound of applause that only he could hear, as if he'd won a race that only he knew about.

He wanted to be a sportswriter. As a kid he wrote for the old World-Telegram, and he wrote for the old Sun, too. He opened Joe Goldstein Public Relations in 1969. From then on, it was as if he was playing the only part he ever could have played, which means himself. In his time in town, there was never anybody quite like him.

The phone would still ring in recent years, just not as often as he finally started to slow down. He was always looking to set the record straight on something in New York, even as he began to spend more and more time in Boca Raton. He had a heart attack there on Thursday and a stroke Friday and then he was on life support and the word came in late in the day that Joey had died at the age of 81. Or whatever he really was.

"Whatever he was talking about, you could always add five years," Breslin said Friday.

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Joey finally stopped running Friday. This time the calls weren't from him. They were about him. This time all the best stories were about him.